come to Boston every so often as his son
was doing graduate work at the
University of Massachusetts. As his lab
also worked on nitrogen fixation, he
would take the opportunity to drop in
on Fred. Each time he saw me he
extended his invitation, but I had the
alibi that I was in the midst of my thesis
work. By 1982, however, Fred told him
I was near completion, and so he got
quite serious about having me teach his
lab molecular techniques. What initially
was supposed to be a short visit
somehow developed into a one-year
plan. About that time, the folks moving
on or scheduled to leave were Sharon
Long for a Stanford faculty position,
Jonathan Jones to Advance Genetic
Sciences, Gary Ruvkun to Wally
Gilbert’s lab, Venkatesan Sundaresan to
Mike Feeling’s lab, and Fran DeBruijn
to Jeff Schell’s empire. Well, you can
imagine the response when folks heard
of my postdoc in China. Not only did
everyone think I was nuts, some even
suggested (trying to be helpful) that this
might mean an end to my career in
the big league. Only Boris Magasanik,
a member of my thesis committee,
offered supportive advice.
I had to wait for my wife to graduate from
Columbia, so I became a postdoc for six
months in Fred’s new lab at the
Massachusetts General Hospital. The
higher postdoctoral pay was necessary
considering my next position. I met
Stephen Howell at the Keystone
Conference and was impressed with his
science and personality, so I sent off a
bunch of postdoctoral fellowship propo-
sals to join his lab upon my return from
Shanghai. The best holiday greeting I
received in the winter of 1983 was a
telegram from the Damon Runyon
Foundation. The Helen Hay Whitney
Foundation wanted an interview, but
would not pay for my international
airfare, so I couldn’t go. With a monthly
salary of ¥200 (equivalent to US
$100, but not convertible to foreign cur-
rency), it was out of consideration. By
early 1984, I also heard from NSF and
since it paid more, I declined the Damon
Runyon fellowship.
I managed to teach molecular biology
techniques through a research project
with a graduate student, Yue Xiong,
and a lab assistant, Qing Gu. We did
functional analysis of nitrogen fixation
gene promoters by site-directed muta-
genesis and DNA sequencing. The
story behind the story could fill pages,
but in short, we completed the work
and published in early 1985, surpris-
ingly before a similar paper by a
British group later that year. The Editor
Rich Losick thought it was the first
paper from China in the Journal of
Bacteriology.From August 1983 to July 1984, my wife
and I lived out of a hotel. With room,
board and roundtrip airfare covered, my
monthly ¥200 RMB was just spending
money. By Chinese standards, it was a
high salary, but we often had to pay
tourist prices at hotel stores. Outside of
the foreigner-only hotels, many items
were rationed, especially food, so money
(our nonconvertible type) was worthless
without the coupons that were rationed
to the Chinese citizens. Of course, while
we muse at this, at the heart of the ration-
ing was poverty. What I saw working in
the midst of the system was quite a con-
trast to what I experienced growing up in
San Francisco, and I am not from privi-
leged background. As a scientist, you
just couldn’t help but to question the
purpose of science and as well as appreci-
ate what food production can mean for
others. China today, at least the coastal
cities, is much better (largely due to econ-
omical reforms). The rural area with
70% of China’s 1.3 billion, however,
still has a very long way to go.
After China, I did my NSF postdoc with
Stephen Howell at UC San Diego and
by the end of 1986, moved to the newly
formed USDA Plant Gene Expression
Center that is affiliated with UC
Berkeley. The scientific career sinceLIFE BOX 9.1. DAVID W. OW 239